“A Great Treasure”
Emeritus member Maxine Isaacs had decided to go back to school. This was after spending 15 years in government and national politics and serving as press secretary and deputy campaign manager to Walter F. Mondale during his presidential bid in 1984.
“In the fall of 1987, I was a fellow at the Institute of Politics at Harvard, when I decided I wanted to teach at the college level,” says Isaacs, who is today an adjunct lecturer in public policy at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government and is chair of the Maryland School of Public Policy's Board of Visitors. “I looked at graduate schools in the Washington , D.C. , area and it was clear that Maryland offered the best program and the only Ph.D. in policy studies, which was the degree that made the most sense for me. Plus, I knew and greatly admired Bill Galston, who agreed to serve as my thesis advisor.”
Isaacs received her Ph.D. in 1994 and at the “age of 46!” she says. That fall she began teaching at the Kennedy School . Looking back, she says, “The Maryland School of Public Policy was perfect for me. I was interested in political communication, and the school offered enormous flexibility, which enabled me to craft a program that was well-suited to my interests. My dissertation was on the relationship between elite and mass opinion in two cases, the Tianament Square Massacre and the aborted Gorbachev coup.”
“I have remained involved with the school,” says Isaacs, “because I would like to help it become even better known so the rest of the country and policy community can come to see what some of us already know very well, what a great treasure it is.”
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